Recently, electric home appliances and other products are increasingly being automated for higher convenience of life. Examples include a light that automatically turns on in response to a person entering a room and an electric toilet seat that opens in response to a person coming and standing in front of the seat. Such technique improves convenience of people's lives.
Other than the examples above, a television receiver system has been known that performs a prescribed process without any user operation. Patent Document 1 describes one such television receiver. According to the description of Patent Document 1, the television receiver accumulates viewing history of the user to determine user preference, and when it is determined that the user is watching a program different from a possibly preferable program in the same time zone as the broadcast time of the preferable program, the television receiver informs the user about the broadcasting of the preferable program on a different channel. Thus, the user will not fail to enjoy the preferable program.
Further advancement of such technique would enable an auto-control television receiver that automatically turns on/off the power at a time point determined in accordance with the viewing pattern of the user on the appropriate channel that matches the viewing pattern of the user, based on the viewing history of the user.
For instance, assume that a user views programs of a certain channel from 10:00 pm to 11:00 pm every night, from Monday to Friday. Using a common television receiver, the user must turn on the power and set the channel. Using the auto-control television system, however, the information that the user “views channel XX from 10:00 pm to 11:00 pm every evening from Monday to Friday” is automatically obtained from the program viewing history of the user. Based on the viewing history, the television receiver could turn on/off automatically and channel could be automatically set. Therefore, when the user is going to view the favorite program that the user always enjoys every Tuesday night at 10:00, it is unnecessary for the user to turn on the power and set the channel by himself/herself. At 10:00 every night, the power of television receiver turns on automatically and the channel is set to the channel of interest. Patent Document 1: Japanese Patent Laying-Open No. 2005-039681